Diaries

Hot on the heels of yesterday's diary, here's your next selection of CC candidates. These 5 (well, 4 of them at least) were chosen because their names have come up and been discussed seriously--not based on the likelihood that they will coach Michigan in 2015. Ergo there's a bigger emphasis on "mmm...not so sure" than last time.

1. John Harbaugh

POTENTIAL UPSIDE: Though not as amped up or total-destruction-oriented as his little brother, John Harbaugh’s NFL success would act as a magnet for recruits, and he clearly knows how to hire a good staff. Seems to "get" Michigan and why it's special. Might even be able to keep Mattison.

POTENTIAL DOWNSIDE: Hasn’t been in college for a long time, so there’s always the risk his strengths as a coach wouldn’t quite translate. Might hire Cam Cameron.

TRANSITION COSTS: Negligible.

OVERALL DESIRABILITY: High. Getting a successful, Super Bowl-winning NFL coach (as opposed to a castoff) would be quite the move for Hackett to make.

CHANCES OF HIM COMING: Low. There was some chatter about it at one point, but it’s fairly unprecedented for a successful NFL coach (who is currently enjoying said success) to bolt for college. That would apply to Jim as well, except that Jim may be a poor fit for the NFL and John is not, and Jim played for Bo and John did not.

2. Gary Patterson

POTENTIAL UPSIDE: High levels of success that are sustainable over time.

POTENTIAL DOWNSIDE: Without ties to the upper Midwest, may have more trouble implementing his vision up north that at a Texas or Oklahoma school. Is reportedly close to Dantonio.

TRANSITION COSTS: Moderate on offense. TCU has implemented a couple spread offenses, and you’d figure that’s what he’d want to do in Ann Arbor as well. Transition to any kind of spread would produce a few growing pains, but hey…can’t be much worse than this year, right? Negligible on defense—Patterson is a defensive guy. Though our personnel doesn’t look much like TCUs, like Graham I think he’d adjust to what he has to work with.

OVERALL DESIRABILITY: Very high. He’s made teeny-weeny TCU a Big 12 power by identifying and developing talent outside the Rivals 250, by implementing a strong defensive scheme, and hiring well on offense. This should translate to success at a major program with a stronger potential recruiting base.

CHANCES OF HIM COMING: May as well be non-existent. Patterson has been linked to nearly every major job opening for years and hasn’t left TCU yet. Sure the same was true of Chris Peterson, and he did take the UW job, but that’s only one state over and he’s been a Northwest guy since 1993. The only job I can see Patterson leaving TCU for would be Oklahoma in the event Bob Stoops goes to Florida or the NFL.

3. Jim McElwain

POTENTIAL UPSIDE: Turns our offense into the efficient, inside zone-based, constraint-loving machine we hoped Nussmeier would bring; hires well enough on defense to toughen up an already-decent unit.

POTENTIAL DOWNSIDE: Has trouble transitioning from low-key Colorado State to big-time Michigan. That scheme may simply be a no-go with our current personnel, and we're not all that patient anymore.

TRANSITION COSTS: Negligible. He runs the same offense we do, just better.

OVERALL DESIRABILITY: Moderate. I really like McElwain and what he’s done at both Alabama and Colorado State. But three years at CSU isn’t much to go by, especially when there are guys out there who have longer resumes. However, if our top plausible picks (Jim Harbaugh, Mullen, Miles and Graham) don’t pan out, McElwain is a solid backup plan.

CHANCES OF HIM COMING: Low to Moderate. I think he’d take the job, but that $7.5 buyout is insane. One could imagine UM paying that for Harbaugh, but it’s tough to see the university paying that for someone who’s essentially “plan E”—especially considering the payouts to Brandon and Hoke. Maybe there’s a loophole? If so the likelihood increases.

4. Tom Herman

POTENTIAL UPSIDE: Like Mullen, the chance he’ll be “Urban 2.0,” pull a Bo and one-up his former mentor. He’s also 39, which means he could stay for a Bo-like tenure.

POTENTIAL DOWNSIDE: With no head coaching experience, there’s the obvious risk that he’d be unprepared to run a major program.

TRANSITION COSTS: Moderate on offense—as mentioned yesterday, spread-with-power is a good fit for the type of kids we can recruit, but it’s not clear that we have the right guys in place for that at QB or RB. Unclear on defense, as he’s never run a defense before. One can assume he’d try to hire someone competent and then delegate, but whether he’d do so successfully is an entirely different question.

OVERALL DESIRABILITY: Moderate. Actually the upside is quite high here, but the unknowns make this a very risky pick. May be a better candidate next time around, especially if we hire someone on the back end of their career, like Miles.

CHANCES OF HIM COMING: If offered, very high. The chances of Herman receiving an offer, however, are low.

I've been loving the on-going CC roundup series by Alum96 and Ron Utah, but honestly I can't get enough of speculating on who our next coach will be. So I figured--what the hell, here's another roundup! Today I look at five potential coaches (well, four real ones) from a different angle...

1. Jim Harbaugh

POTENTIAL UPSIDE: Could tear a path of destruction through the weak Big 10, including among those who have benefitted most from our seven-year journey through football purgatory. No question whatsoever about his drive to win, which would probably happen frequently and emphatically. Bonus of the inevitable "what’s YOUR deal" moment with Dantonio.

POTENTIAL DOWNSIDE: Bolting to the NFL is always a concern; ultra-competitive, Alpha-plus personality rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

TRANSITION COSTS: Minimal. Harbaugh’s NFL success (as player and coach) would act as a magnet for recruits. And while Harbaugh is an inveterate tinkerer, he’s had success running multiple offensive schemes (power running, TE-heavy at Stanford; zone running, dual-threat stuff with the 49ers).

OVERALL DESIRABILITY: Astronomically high.

CHANCES OF HIM COMING: Either very high or very low, depending on which unsubstantiated rumors you believe.

2. Les Miles

POTENTIAL UPSIDE: Turns Michigan into “the LSU of the North,” to compete with MSU’s “Alabama of the North” and OSU’s “Florida of the North.” Great recruiting classes, monster defenses, good enough offenses and a healthy proportion of 10+ win seasons.

POTENTIAL DOWNSIDE: Always possible that a coach in his 60s will have lost his drive this late in his career, and would be content bringing stability to the program rather than championships. Unclear if his roster management would suffer in the no-oversigning context of the Big 10. That thing that may have happened in the 90s might prove to still be a source of division among program insiders.

TRANSITION COSTS: Minimal. Miles doesn’t do anything schematically that would require different players from the ones we have (though he would probably do a better job developing talent).

OVERALL DESIRABILITY: High for many people; extremely low for some others. Balance is moderate-to-high.

CHANCES OF HIM COMING: He has allegedly said that he wouldn’t say no to Michigan, but even so we failed to offer him the last two times, which makes you wonder if we ever would.

3. Dan Mullen

POTENTIAL UPSIDE: This year is no fluke, meaning he's Urban 2.0. Could therefore pull a Bo and one-up the old mentor.

POTENTIAL DOWNSIDE: Success this year at Missisippi State could turn out to be a mirage of sorts, and previous years, in which Mississippi State beat the SEC bottom-dwellers and lost to the elite could turn out to be more indicative of what he'd do here.

TRANSITION COSTS: Moderate on offense—spread-with-power is a good fit for the Big 10, as Meyer has demonstrated at OSU, but we don’t have a Braxton Miller or Carlos Hyde on the roster, so it would probably take a little longer for us to get all the pieces in place. Negligible on defense.

OVERALL DESIRABILITY: High, and potentially very high, but with an element of nervousness.

CHANCES OF HIM COMING: Depends on Florida. Most have him pegged for Gainesville, though that may be a no-go. If Florida is in the running, I’d say our chances of landing him are moderate at best. But if Florida is indeed out of the running, the Michigan is the only AAA job on the board in a year when his stock will never be higher.

POTENTIAL DOWNSIDE: Treats Michigan as another quick stop on the roadtrip; outward Christian piety clashes with institutional culture at the University.

TRANSITION COSTS: Moderate on offense—we have enough wideouts to run a passing spread, but I’m not sure the rest of the roster is well suited to it. Low on defense—we don’t really look like ASU on defense, but Graham is a defensive-minded coach, so I'm sure he can adjust.

CHANCES OF HIM COMING: Moderate. He’s always a risk to go anywhere the lights are bigger and brighter, but he’s also close to some of RR’s staffers, so may not have a great opinion of Michigan as a work environment (for an outsider). May be more keen on Florida.

Turnover analysis is always popular during the football season, but I don’t know that you often see a description of the historic luck that a team has had in turning over the ball under a particular regime, so I thought this might be an interesting route to take.

What I’ve done here is take the range of in-game turnover margins in the entirety of Hoke’s time here to date and compiled some performance and other items as it relates to each of the individual totals rather than the games. In other words, when we have had an in-game turnover margin of “+3”, for example, how did we do? How many times did we actually do that? Those are the sorts of questions we’re going to examine here.

One minor note – I did this for the regular season games only, so if you count only 46 games in these totals and wonder if stuff is missing, that would be the reason. I wanted to concentrate on our past performance against more typical OOC and conference opponents.

I took a couple approaches with the data, but first let me talk about the data.

In these 46 regular season games to date, we’ve had eight unique outcomes when it comes to turnover margin, ranging from +3 to -4. Both of those extreme performances are rare, the latter being fortunately rare – only twice in each case though. There are a few instance in here where there is an average of a small pool of numbers (I know, grumble grumble), but it is quirk of the size and the things I am attempting to demonstrate, but I say it so you can adjust your conclusions accordingly as we have an instance or two of “n” equals “not enough” perhaps. It is what it is – technical jargon there.

The first pass at this is a two-in-one sort of deal. The table below shows each achieved outcome, the win-loss record associated with it, the average scoring margin in those games, and the overall win percentage for each outcome.

As you will note, there is some relation to turnover margin and how you perform:

What you might be able to see here is that the relationship between turnover margin and the average margin of victory / defeat is pretty clear – the R-squared value is 0.89, in fact. The quirky nature of football (such as winning a game where you are -3 on turnovers – see above) makes the relationship to win percentage, at least in the case of Michigan, present but comparatively mild.

Here’s the distribution of the number of games at each outcome in a convenient histogram:

I have a feeling that a lot of teams would have a fairly similar curve, so while it the case that the most common outcome for Michigan is indeed “-1”, I would think having a majority of your games in the “1” to “-1” range isn’t uncommon at all. That being said, the overall distribution does skew ever so slightly towards the negative for Michigan – of the 46 regular season games since the start of 2011, 21 of them have had use on the short end of turnovers and 10 games were a draw on this metric.

Another look at this involved all the unique outcomes in these games when it came to the physical count of turnovers. Obviously, the best you can do is none – we’ve done that five times. The worst we’ve done, and this game is probably still a good reason to drink, is six turnovers. The table is below:

TURNOVERS

COUNT (MICH)

COUNT (OPP)

0

5

8

1

20

14

2

4

16

3

10

4

4

6

3

5

0

1

6

1

0

Here’s what that looks like graphically:

Curiously bimodal, in our case. A nice spike at “1” and another, albeit smaller one at “3”. Our opponents have generally stayed in the 1-2 per game range, which is probably something that you can say about many teams, so it likely isn’t a unique result across FBS. The interesting thing is that bimodal distribution in our numbers, as well as this:

TURNOVERS

MICH. AVG. POINTS

OPP. AVG. POINTS

0

34.80

22.13

1

35.10

22.93

2

26.00

18.56

3

28.50

11.75

4

18.50

26.67

5

NO DATA

31.00

6

6.00

NO DATA

Our performance here is interesting too. Very stable between 0 and 1, as you might expect, then it drops by about nine points at 2, increases a little at 3 (because B1G mainly), then behaves more normally.

On a week with no news (other than bad news), I thought I'd share some of the interesting numbers about Michigan and B1G football that have caught my eye.

Devin Gardner before he was 98, which now feels like his age and his number

Senior Day

12...or is it? I'm not sure if Brady Hoke was still counting Frank Clark as a senior or not when he mentioned the "12" seniors we'll be honoring this week, but there are only 11 on the roster, and that includes Desmond Morgan. If there were actually 12, it would be the same number of seniors we had on the roster in RR's final season (2010).

Eight. The number of seniors on the depth chart, including the kicker and punter. Of course, that doesn't count Clark.

Four. There are four seniors on the defensive depth chart, with Beyer, Ryan, and Taylor as starters and Hollowell as a back-up.

One. There is only one senior starting on offense (Gardner), and only one other senior on the offensive depth chart (Burzynski).

TFLs were the trademark offensive play in 2013

Improvement?

4.51. Michigan's YPC is a full 1.23 yards better than 2013's pathetic 3.28 per carry mark. That's good for 57th in the country, compared to 115th in the country last year.

3.23. Against Minnesota, Michigan's YPP (yds/play). It's the worst of the season so far, although 3.26 against MSU is awfully close. Last year, U-M was under 3 YPP three times--Iowa, MSU, and Nebraska, with a low of 2.77 vs. Iowa.

113. At 8.96 TFLs allowed per game, Michigan's total of 113 for the 2013 season was the worst (125th) in college football. This year's current total is 54, which is 54th in the country.

5.28. Michigan's 5.28 YPP (85th) on the season is worse than 2013's 5.44, 2012's 6.07, and 2011's 6.23. That's an easy (and awful) trendline to draw in your head.

117. Michigan's rank in YPG this year. We are also 112th in scoring offense, one spot better than Northwestern. We were 46th in scoring offense in 2013, 57th in 2012, and 26th in 2011. We are just barely over 20 PPG this year. Melvin Gordon averages 15 PPG by himself.

114. Michigan's rank in passing YPG. We finished 2013 at 51. Shockingly, there are three teams in the B1G with lower ranks (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana) and two of those teams have better records than Michigan. The B1G has six teams ranked 94th or lower in passing YPG.

4. The B1G has four teams (OSU, MSU, Wisc, Neb) ranked in the top 15 in scoring offense this year, more than any other conference.

This guy still has four years of eligibility

Talent

36. According to Rivals, the number of four and five star players Michigan has recruited since 2012. ALL of those players are still on the roster, and all had offers from top-tier programs.

13. The number of returning scholarship OL in 2015, 16 total.

6. The number of four-star (Rivals) players who committed in 2011. Two are starters (Beyer and Taylor)--the same number who are no longer with the team (Barnett, Bryant).

3. In what should be the class's RS SR year, only three commits from the 2010 class remain on the team.

Please come home. Or send your brother.

Harbaugh

5. The number of "Jim Harbaugh to Michigan" rumor stories on Google News in the past three days.

5. The number of "Jim Harbaugh to Oakland Raiders" rumor stories on Google News in the past three days.

18. Number of days since a "John Harbaugh to Michigan" rumor story appeared on Google.

I'll be moving these advanced stats updates to the diary since its mostly for data nerds who like to read a lot of prose.

With that said with UM in a bye week this week's version will be shorter than usual due to not much to update. As we get deeper into the season, we are at the point now where you are who you think you were and your FEI + S&P+ data won't move too much unless you have a Wisconsin-Nebraska type of game which significantly changed Wiscy's offensive and Nebraska's defensive ratings.

If you are not familiar with these measures please go check out Football Outsiders; S&P descriptions here and FEI descriptions there. Contrast these to the simplistic "total defense" and "total offense" most of the world uses which is simply total yards gained or given up per game - which is apples to oranges based on what conference you play in plus does not account for garbage time. FEI has a much stronger SOS component to it, so S&P+ is more kind to the Big 10.

I've also added a new section below the main data for CC's so you can see how they stack up.

S&P + dropped from 31 to 33 (also improved to 5th in conference as Nebraska fell behind UM - this is the benefit of UM avoiding Wisconsin!)

Big 10 plus a few others:

oFEI

oS&P+

dFEI

dS&P+

UM

94

76

35

33

MSU

27

13

53

15

OSU

11

1

18

11

ND

31

16

21

43

PSU

104

85

8

13

Nebraska

40

26

26

37

Rutgers

63

42

63

66

Maryland

58

69

59

44

Indiana

85

68

87

96

Wisconsin

34

15

11

9

Utah

72

79

4

35

Minnesota

48

47

38

40

NWestern

54

87

42

51

Iowa

61

83

36

53

Purdue

67

72

68

63

Illinois

88

77

95

91

Arizona

28

49

29

44

Opponent Watch:

Maryland - same comments as last week. I've watched Maryland 3x this year including this weekend. Without Stefon Diggs and his 700 yardish receiving yards they are super not dangerous. Deon Long is decent and will probably give Ray Taylor all sorts of trouble but Trae Waynes erased him last week so CJ Brown was mostly throwing to a WR who had 0 catches on the year coming into the MSU-Maryland game. They have almost no run game not named CJ Brown; we actually have more of a run game - it's that bad. Their defense is middle of the road in a Big 10/ACC kind of way. D line played strong in 1st half before wearing down. This has all the earmarks of M00M for a good while before ending in a scintillating 17-16 affair. Or 14-13. Or 18-15. You get the point.

OSU - Florida went for the Earl Bruce "play with your hearts on your sleeve for your deposed coach" to close the season. UM is "still evaluating" so no hopes for an Earl Bruce moment. I expect a carbon copy off the MSU game where UM's defense keeps it relatively respectful for a half while the offense LOLs all day. Then OSU pulls away in the second half as Hoke claps. No M00O for you.

TL;DR comments:

Offenses - Not much to add here. OSU, MSU, and Wisconsin have offenses. Nebraska has a QB who makes Denard Robinson look like Dan Marino so when facing legit defenses they cannot do much (MSU/Wiscy). Thankfully it is the Big 10 where legit defenses are in short supply. Unless you go to NCAA.com and bring up "total defense" - which of last week told us we are in a golden era of defense with 8 of our 14 members in the top 25 of defense. WOO HOO. All other offenses in the conference are pretty hit or miss.

Unless they play Notre Dame at which point they look solid.

Except for ours.

Aside from that a lot of 1 dimensional (Minnesota/Maryland) or no dimensional (UM/PSU) offenses.

Defenses - The bye week was great for UM as it moved up 1 slot in the conference from 6th to 5th in both FEI (passing Iowa by 1 slot) and S&P+ (passing Nebraska). More byes please! Thank the football gods this defense doesnt face TCU/Baylor/West Virginia type offenses and found 1 of 2 Pac 12 teams (Utah/Stanford) with LOL type offenses to schedule as almost everyone else in the Pac 12 can throw like mad. And we don't defend throwing very well.

I tipped the hat to the PSU and Wisconsin DCs last week and let me tip it again to Wisconsin's (who I'd love as our DC). No gimmicky names or trademarks - just a bunch of decent athletes playing incredibly assignment sound football with premium level tackling. If not for 3 Wisconsin turnovers early in that game they might have held Nebraska to 10 or less. This with almost all new starters v 2013.

And just wanted to again point out the quirk with MSU's defense FEI rating. MSU plays a "break dont bend" defense - they rank high in almost every category except explosive drives. When they get beat it is not a 11 play 78 yard drive - it is a 60 yard run or a 45 yard pass. So FEI is punishing an otherwise "good" defense for that. If the Big 10 had any sort of decent QB play they'd have a lot more pain this year but aside from OSU and Purdue (yes Purdue) MSU has faced almost no throwing threats in their conf schedule.

New (and temporary) section

Real or imagined CC's data for comparison

oFEI

oS&P+

dFEI

dS&P+

TCU

21

12

9

14

ASU

13

34

28

30

Oklahoma

12

6

50

19

OK State

86

82

82

57

LSU

50

19

15

3

Miss State

25

5

6

8

Kentucky

77

52

83

60

Tennessee

71

48

20

24

OK state in full tire fire mode - very young team but surprising this deep into Gundy's career to be this butt naked.

LSU's offensive stats took a hit after a goose egg vs Arkansas

Will be interested to see what Mark Stoops does in year 3 at UK - this is the year most of the top end coaches see significant statistical improvement when they take over bad teams.

In trying to analyze the ACC basketball landscape for my own blog, I came up with a thing I decided to call Impact Score. It measures (a bit abstractly, since the numbers don't have units) a player's positive or negative impact on a basketball game. I figured it would be handy for the B1G, too. It's a simple formula:

(O-rating - 100) * Min% * (Poss% / 0.2)

All numbers are from KenPom, naturally. Explaining each:

-- O-rating minus 100 assumes that an average player would have an O-rating of 100, and generate one point per possession. The difference between a player's O-rating and 100 is their impact, for better or worse, compared to an average college player.

-- The number is reduced by the percentage of minutes the player plays. No impact when he's not on the court. All else being equal, a player who plays the whole game has twice the impact of a guy who sits out half of it.

-- Poss% / 0.2: There are five players on a court, so theoretically they should be responsible for about 20% of their team's possessions, and in fact, most players hover around that number. All else being equal, a guy whose poss% is 22% has a 10% greater impact than someone at the 20% average.

Example: An O-rating of 110, with a 50% min% (roughly corresponding to 20 mpg) and poss% of 22% has an Impact Score of 5.5 (10 * 0.5 * 1.1.)

Obvious caveats include the fact that this is for offense only (O-rating, duh) and that this kind of thing only roughly corresponds to success in the upcoming season - returning players is only the start of any such analysis, and this wouldn't take into account newcomers at all. Nor does this measure pure, sweet, beautiful grit, lovingly mined from the Grit Mines of the soaring mountains of the Yukon and shipped farm-fresh to your TV, so you won't see Aaron Craft on any of these lists.

One benefit of this over just looking at O-ratings is that while O-ratings tend to have wild-looking outliers for players who don't play much, this softens that up quite a bit. Most O-ratings, at least in big-conference play, are between about 90 and 120, while benchwarmers might be anywhere from 40 to 150. But because they have miniscule minutes percentages and often very low possession percentages as well, their Impact Scores barely register.

All that said, here are some tables to make sense of the Big Ten.

First, last year's total IS's for each team:

Team

Impact Score

Michigan

85.69

Wisconsin

77.75

Iowa

68.77

Michigan State

62.86

Minnesota

39.43

Penn State

27.01

Indiana

23.10

Ohio State

23.00

Maryland

15.15

Purdue

13.33

Illinois

7.35

Nebraska

4.95

Rutgers

2.94

Northwestern

-30.31

This is a pretty good approximation of the order in which you'd find them in KenPom's team O-ratings. Even though Nebrasketball was a force last year, it wasn't exactly the case on offense. Northwestern's offense stunk. Penn State is a little high, mainly because they had a couple stars who played all the time and got little support.

Next is the teams ranked by the total scores of their returning players:

Team

Impact Score

Wisconsin

61.49

Iowa

48.71

Michigan

30.59

Michigan State

26.44

Indiana

19.54

Minnesota

19.47

Penn State

17.45

Maryland

16.87

Purdue

10.14

Nebraska

8.55

Ohio State

6.76

Rutgers

4.81

Illinois

-0.96

Northwestern

-24.33

It's certainly possible, of course, to go up from year to year - all you have to do is lose a few players with O-ratings below 100. Sometimes that really does mean addition by subtraction. Sometimes it's sneakily indicative of losing a defensive stopper - this isn't a great example because I'm not accounting for season-ending injuries, but Leslee Smith had a 97 O-rating and thus a negative Impact Score, but was a defensive hoss for the Huskers last year. Nebraska would actually even be a little higher if I was counting players missing the season with injuries. But again - all offense here.

Next four charts will be player-focused. First, the top 20 players in the Big Ten last year, not counting anyone from the interlopers:

Player

Team

Impact Score

Nik Stauskas

Michigan

24.77

Frank Kaminsky

Wisconsin

20.48

Ben Brust

Wisconsin

16.69

Aaron White

Iowa

15.79

Josh Gasser

Wisconsin

15.37

Yogi Ferrell

Indiana

15.28

Gary Harris

Michigan State

13.48

Roy Devyn Marble

Iowa

12.98

Austin Hollins

Minnesota

12.21

Sam Dekker

Wisconsin

12.19

Branden Dawson

Michigan State

11.66

Glenn Robinson III

Michigan

11.63

Jordan Morgan

Michigan

11.33

Walter Pitchford

Nebraska

11.20

Caris LeVert

Michigan

10.57

Adreian Payne

Michigan State

10.41

D.J. Newbill

Penn State

9.51

Tim Frazier

Penn State

8.79

Lenzelle Smith

Ohio State

8.77

Jon Ekey

Illinois

8.63

J-Mo is a perfect example of how this is supposed to work. Morgan was an incredibly efficient player with an O-rating of 128.2 - up in the stars, higher even than Stauskas. But with relatively low usage, his actual impact is measured better here. Still high, but not, like, the Big Ten's most elitest player. Iowa's Marble is another good one - his O-rating is good, not great, but wicked high usage means that Iowa will miss him more than, say, Illinois will miss Jon Ekey.

Next, last year's "worst" 20 players - or at least, those with the lowest Impact Scores, meaning they were both inefficient and highly used.

Player

Team

Impact Score

Tai Webster

Nebraska

-11.16

Dave Sobolewski

Northwestern

-8.68

Sanjay Lumpkin

Northwestern

-8.10

Jaylon Tate

Illinois

-5.78

Nathan Taphorn

Northwestern

-5.51

Tracy Abrams

Illinois

-4.56

Bryson Scott

Purdue

-4.25

Stanford Robinson

Indiana

-3.53

Jeremy Hollowell

Indiana

-3.43

Deverell Biggs

Nebraska

-3.33

John Johnson

Penn State

-3.19

Nikola Cerina

Northwestern

-2.83

Jay Simpson

Purdue

-2.27

Trey McDonald

Ohio State

-2.13

Nathan Hawkins

Nebraska

-2.00

Amedeo Della Valle

Ohio State

-1.88

JerShon Cobb

Northwestern

-1.83

Daquein McNeil

Minnesota

-1.59

Kale Abrahamson

Northwestern

-1.50

Nnanna Egwu

Illinois

-1.49

Many of these guys are simply freshmen, fortunately lightly-used, and part of the future plans of their teams. Some are not actually bad players, just sort of stiffs on offense. But, some were truly awful last year. Jaylon Tate took 23 three-pointers and hit exactly one. Bad three-point shooting is common throughout this group. Northwestern's piteousness on offense shines throughout this chart. And the big winner here, Tai Webster, literally turned the ball over more than he scored (58 TOs, 34 buckets), couldn't shoot worth a damn from any range, and played almost 23 mpg.

Now for the conference's best returning players. Interloping teams are now included.

Player

Team

Impact Score

Frank Kaminsky

Wisconsin

20.48

Aaron White

Iowa

15.79

Josh Gasser

Wisconsin

15.37

Yogi Ferrell

Indiana

15.28

Sam Dekker

Wisconsin

12.19

Branden Dawson

Michigan State

11.66

Walter Pitchford

Nebraska

11.20

Caris LeVert

Michigan

10.57

D.J. Newbill

Penn State

9.51

Dez Wells

Maryland

9.07

Andre Hollins

Minnesota

8.55

Jarrod Uthoff

Iowa

8.19

Gabriel Olaseni

Iowa

8.11

Rayvonte Rice

Illinois

7.92

Myles Mack

Rutgers

7.57

Derrick Walton

Michigan

7.37

Travis Trice

Michigan State

6.97

Jake Layman

Maryland

6.93

Spike Albrecht

Michigan

6.59

Zak Irvin

Michigan

6.58

With three of the top five returning players, it's easy to see why Wisconsin is such a prohibitive favorite.

Finally, the 20 worst returning players. Most of the usefulness of the list really is in the top ten - once you get down to #15 or so, any negative impact is pretty benign, not a hell of a lot below average, lightly-used, or worth a damn on defense - but I figured I wouldn't just change up the number at the very end.

Player

Team

Impact Score

Tai Webster

Nebraska

-11.16

Dave Sobolewski

Northwestern

-8.68

Sanjay Lumpkin

Northwestern

-8.10

Jaylon Tate

Illinois

-5.78

Nathan Taphorn

Northwestern

-5.51

Tracy Abrams

Illinois

-4.56

Bryson Scott

Purdue

-4.25

Stanford Robinson

Indiana

-3.53

Greg Lewis

Rutgers

-3.35

John Johnson

Penn State

-3.19

Malick Kone

Rutgers

-2.75

Damonte Dodd

Maryland

-2.30

Trey McDonald

Ohio State

-2.13

JerShon Cobb

Northwestern

-1.83

Varun Ram

Maryland

-1.83

Junior Etou

Rutgers

-1.62

Daquein McNeil

Minnesota

-1.59

Nnanna Egwu

Illinois

-1.49

Leslee Smith

Nebraska

-1.37

Alvin Ellis

Michigan State

-1.35

As always, Northwestern reigns supreme.

Clearly, this does nothing to take into account freshmen, transfers (in, that is) and coaching changes, individual improvements from year to year, as well as the chemistry aspect of putting together a basketball team. But I think it makes a great starting point for analyzing a conference (which naturally is why I waited until after the season started and the preseason stuff is complete.) Also, it's helpful, I think, to see who's missing from the top 20 - it helps identify volume scorers and just plain overrated players - possible examples being Terran Petteway and Aaron Craft. And this kind of thing might be useful at midpoints of the season as well, though there's been less time to tamp down the spikes and valleys inherent in the O-ratings.